iPhone 6 Users Report Random Restart Issues

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) just can’t catch a break with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. We’ve had Bendgate and Hairgate and now apparently there is some kind of technical defect that causes some of them to just randomly restart themselves. It certainly sounds annoying, to say the least.

Apple forums, Twitter filled with restart complaints

MacRumors reports that there are numerous complaints on the Apple forums about the 128-gigabyte versions of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus restarting themselves repeatedly. Business Insider also spotted several reports of this same issue on Twitter.

The reports date all the way back to September when Apple released the phones. Owners say that often the restarting problem begins when porting over backups from an older smartphone. The issue also seems to crop up when users check notifications or switch between apps. Software updates apparently haven’t been successful in fixing the issue either.

It’s unclear just how many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units are affected by this restarting problem. According to TechRadar, however, the issue seems to mostly affect those who purchased the 128-gigabyte versions and have hundreds and maybe even as many as a thousand apps installed on their iPhones. The iPhone 6 or 6 Plus units that have the problem crash in one of three ways: a red screen, a blue screen, and just a restart showing the Apple logo and taking a long time to start back up.

iPhone 6 memory may be to blame

According to Business Korea, some have suggested that the issue might have to do with the type of memory that’s in the 128-gigabyte version of the iPhone 6. More specifically, the website suggests that there could be “a problem in the controller IC of triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash.

This particular type of memory is a solid state that stores three bits of data on each flash media cell. It is able to store two or three times as much data as a single-level cell and a multi-level cell solid-state flash memory. In addition, TLC memory is less expensive. The trade-off, however, is that it is slower than the other two types of memory in terms of writing and reading data.

Of course Apple hasn’t yet commented on the issue, which we’ll call Restartgate or perhaps Crashgate, just for fun. Take your pick. Anyway, it’s unclear whether the claims about the memory being to blame are correct or not.